Northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) are small quails in the New World Quail family (Odontophoridae) and are one of the most phenotypically diverse avian species. Despite extensive research on bobwhite ecology, genomic studies investigating the evolution of phenotypic diversity in this species are lacking. Here, we present a new, highly contiguous assembly for bobwhites using tissue samples from a vouchered, wild, female bird collected in Louisiana. By performing a de novo assembly and scaffolding the assembly with Dovetail Chicago and HiC libraries and the HiRise pipeline, we produced an 866.8 Mb assembly including 1,512 scaffolds with a scaffold N50 of 66.8 Mb, a scaffold L90 of 17, and a BUSCO completeness score of 90.8%. This new assembly represents approximately 96% of the non-repetitive and 84% of the entire bobwhite genome size, greatly improves scaffold lengths and contiguity compared to an existing draft bobwhite genome, and provides an important tool for future studies of evolutionary and functional genomics in bobwhites.

21 22 Northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) are small quails in the New World Quail family 23 (Odontophoridae) and are one of the most phenotypically diverse avian species. Despite 24 extensive research on bobwhite ecology, genomic studies investigating the evolution of 25 phenotypic diversity in this species are lacking. Here, we present a new, highly contiguous 26 assembly for bobwhites using tissue samples from a vouchered, wild, female bird collected in 27 Louisiana. Using Dovetail Chicago and HiC libraries with the HiRise assembly pipeline, we 28 produced an 866.8 Mbp assembly including 1,512 scaffolds with a contig N50 of 66.8 Mbp, a 29 scaffold L50 of four, and a BUSCO completeness score of 90.8%. This new assembly greatly 30 improves scaffold lengths and contiguity compared to an existing draft bobwhite genome and 31 provides an important tool for future studies of evolutionary and functional genomics in 32 bobwhites. 33